Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizen can change the world
Tonight's lesson: the difference between a movie that is good, and a movie that is interesting.*
After exploding into the mainstream in the mid-'90s following a smattering of remarkably avant-garde indies that won him a rabid but tiny fan base, Gus Van Sant lost his way. Remaking the iconic Psycho shot-for-shot might have possessed some kind of insanely twisted logic, but there could be no excuse for Finding Forrester, as soulless a studio journeyman project as you could ever hope to see. And Van Sant knew this: that is why, in 2002, he fled mainstream cinema for the farthest opposite corner he could find without abandoning narrative filmmaking altogether, in a series of four features (and a handful of contributions to omnibus projects) united by their essentially plotless screenplays, ages-long takes, vast silences, and indifferently differentiated characters. Gerry, the Palme d'Or-winning Elephant, Last Days - these three usually called the "Death Trilogy" - and Paranoid Park are not in any way flawless movies (I for one find Last Days virtually unwatchable), but each and every one of them plants something in your brain that simmers unnoticed for ages, so that months - years! - after you've seen them, you find yourself recalling that one shot, or that brief snippet of dialogue, and it thus that you realise that you've watched something much more valuable than a flawless movie: you have watched something so compelling and unusual and cleverly made that it snuck in and attached itself to some primordial node of your brain, unnoticed while you were busy trying to figure out why Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's little brother were wandering around the desert, not doing anything.
Recharged from his self-imposed six-year exile, Van Sant has come roaring back to audience-friendly filmmaking with Milk, a movie whose high-minded prestigiousness could hardly be more obvious: it is a Biography of an Important Man whose life and death present Lessons on the Issues of the Day made by Significant Actors performing Noble Impersonations. It is, by nearly every single objective yardstick available to the critic, a better film than any of Van Sant's stylistically audacious, dramatically inert experiments. And frankly, it is simply not very interesting.
I need to make something entirely clear before I go any further: there is nothing particularly wrong with a good movie being uninteresting. Milk is an entirely worthwhile film that I would happily see a second, third, or fourth time, that I would recommend to anybody looking to see a good movie right now, and that will surely be better than at least some of the films it is likely to share a Best Picture nomination with at the Oscars. But I do not love it, in a way that I love Gerry or Paranoid Park. I respect it, and then file it away, and forget about it a little bit.
Part of this is because Milk is a representative of a genre that I unabashedly have no particular use for: it's a biopic, basically, although one that covers a fairly small slice of its subject's life, retelling the last eight years, from 1970 to 1978, in the life of Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), a City Supervisor in San Francisco who was the first openly gay man elected to major public office in the United States. After successfully fighting the vicious Proposition 6 (not unlike the scummy Proposition 8 that so recently passed in California, except that it probably would have had worse long-term repercussions), among other legislative triumphs, Milk was assassinated by a disgruntled, homophobic ex-supervisor named Dan White (Josh Brolin), who had just been rejected for re-appointment to his position after resigning in a fit of pique; White also assassinated San Francisco's mayor, George Moscone (Victor Garber), minutes before turning the gun on Milk.
Milk's life is rich as a subject for cinema, and we certainly could do to have a strong, compelling film treating on his life and achievements. And as it just so happens, we've had one for 24 years: the superlative documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, which runs 38 minutes shorter than Milk while containing more detail about the man's life and the culture of San Francisco in the '70s, the latter topic something that Van Sant's film doesn't really address whatsoever. It's not Milk's fault that it's not as good as a documentary that came out before Ronald Reagan was re-elected president, but no movie exists in a vacuum, and it's impossible for me to argue in all sincerity, that if you're going to see just one movie about Harvey Milk, it should be the one in theaters right now.
At any rate, setting aside those concerns as being overly nitpicky and ungenerous (not to mention that I can spend the rest of my life trumpeting the successes of 24-year-old documentaries, but that doesn't mean anybody is ever going to listen to me), my chief complaint about Milk is that a substantially more interesting movie keeps threatening to pop out and overwhelm the very tasteful study that Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black have worked so hard to construct. (It wouldn't do for me to miss pointing out that the screenplay is very much the weakest element of the film, and everything that works - sometimes smashingly well - only does so by overcoming the script). Particularly in the first half, before Milk's election in 1977, Van Sant and editor Elliot Graham play some wild tricks on the audience, hopscotching from moment to moment (the film is framed by an audio tape Milk recorded shortly before his death, which he always feared would be coming soon, recounting his life and achievements), flipping between newly-filmed footage, stock footage, and newly-filmed footage meant to look like stock footage. There's some heady conceptual work digging into the relationship between reportage and memory going on, and if the whole film had continued in this vein it would hands-down be Van Sant's finest project since My Own Private Idaho. Even in the back half, when notorious right-wing monster Anita Bryant comes into focus, she's presented entirely through stock footage, making one of the most effective and unusual movie villains of the year, and here too it seems like Milk might just turn out to be a masterpiece. But no, it settles down and becomes needlessly typical and hagiographic - like any proper biopic, Milk is the kind of film where all of the protagonist's flaws are forgiven because he feels so incredibly guilty about them, and thus he is essentially blameless. Once again, I must feebly point to the documentary, which is no less loving of the man but far more willing to explore his less savory aspects, such as his shrewd politicking.
My Lord, it does seem like I have a vendetta against the film, which really isn't true. As far as paint-by-numbers biopics go, Milk is unquestionably the best we've seen in years - maybe even the whole decade. Boasting tremendously solid production design that turns San Francisco, 2008 into a dead ringer for San Francisco, 1976, Milk looks absolutely fantastic, and while Harris Savides's cinematography isn't so effective as in his last 1970s period piece set in Frisco, Zodiac, there still aren't many DPs out there right now so willing to use film grain as an important textural element in their photography, rather than trying to airbrush it all from existence.
As for the performances, there's hardly a misstep among them. Penn's uncanny recreation of Milk is getting the most attention, obviously, but it's not just mimicry: along with Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky, Penn gives one of the year's greatest performances as an individual who appears outwardly to be sickeningly cheerful, but whose happiness, while genuine, is part of a much more complex series of emotions that only slowly reveal themselves to us. But he's not even the best member of the cast: that would be Emile Hirsch, an actor I typically can't stand, who plays the young gay activist Cleve Jones, encapsulating all of the snottiness and self-certainty and righteousness of young politicos the world over, and doing it in a way that makes us want to root for him rather than slap him. He outshines a crackerjack cast including two heavily-buzzed Oscar hopefuls who both deserve it: Brolin as the increasingly worn-out Dan White, and James Franco as Scott Smith, Milk's one true love; plus Diego Luna who is tremendously effective as a gigantically annoying neurotic, and Alison Pill as Milk's campaign manager, one of those roles that's always tremendously entertaining in political campaign movies.
Nearly everything, save the writing (which is full of "biopic" lines: h/t Dave Edelstein, scroll down; and light on context and characterisation) is right about Milk; except for some reason, I just can't love it. It is solid craftsmanship throughout. I suspect it's just the case that Van Sant and company wanted so very badly to make an important film about an important that they didn't want to risk adding in anything that might make it challenging.
And before I sign off, I might as well point out the obvious: Milk, as a political document, is a tremendously vital piece of work, and I suppose for John and Jane Middleamerica, the sight of Sean Penn and James Franco with their tongues down each other's throats is probably quite challenging enough, thank you. So insofar as it pushes gay rights with a mighty fervor, I can't help but adore it. But take Brokeback Mountain, which did the same thing (though it was not nearly this gay), and is a tremendous work of art besides. Yes, yes, I know that it's hip to find Brokeback disposable these days. Fuck that. Maybe all I'm really saying is that I like tragic love stories more than I like biopics. At any rate, no matter how very important I think Milk is culturally, praising a film's aesthetic because you agree with its politics isn't criticism. It's Zhdanovism, and I'll have nothing to do with it.
8/10
*"Interesting" and "good" aren't always incompatible, of course. But they are in this particular case.
After exploding into the mainstream in the mid-'90s following a smattering of remarkably avant-garde indies that won him a rabid but tiny fan base, Gus Van Sant lost his way. Remaking the iconic Psycho shot-for-shot might have possessed some kind of insanely twisted logic, but there could be no excuse for Finding Forrester, as soulless a studio journeyman project as you could ever hope to see. And Van Sant knew this: that is why, in 2002, he fled mainstream cinema for the farthest opposite corner he could find without abandoning narrative filmmaking altogether, in a series of four features (and a handful of contributions to omnibus projects) united by their essentially plotless screenplays, ages-long takes, vast silences, and indifferently differentiated characters. Gerry, the Palme d'Or-winning Elephant, Last Days - these three usually called the "Death Trilogy" - and Paranoid Park are not in any way flawless movies (I for one find Last Days virtually unwatchable), but each and every one of them plants something in your brain that simmers unnoticed for ages, so that months - years! - after you've seen them, you find yourself recalling that one shot, or that brief snippet of dialogue, and it thus that you realise that you've watched something much more valuable than a flawless movie: you have watched something so compelling and unusual and cleverly made that it snuck in and attached itself to some primordial node of your brain, unnoticed while you were busy trying to figure out why Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's little brother were wandering around the desert, not doing anything.
Recharged from his self-imposed six-year exile, Van Sant has come roaring back to audience-friendly filmmaking with Milk, a movie whose high-minded prestigiousness could hardly be more obvious: it is a Biography of an Important Man whose life and death present Lessons on the Issues of the Day made by Significant Actors performing Noble Impersonations. It is, by nearly every single objective yardstick available to the critic, a better film than any of Van Sant's stylistically audacious, dramatically inert experiments. And frankly, it is simply not very interesting.
I need to make something entirely clear before I go any further: there is nothing particularly wrong with a good movie being uninteresting. Milk is an entirely worthwhile film that I would happily see a second, third, or fourth time, that I would recommend to anybody looking to see a good movie right now, and that will surely be better than at least some of the films it is likely to share a Best Picture nomination with at the Oscars. But I do not love it, in a way that I love Gerry or Paranoid Park. I respect it, and then file it away, and forget about it a little bit.
Part of this is because Milk is a representative of a genre that I unabashedly have no particular use for: it's a biopic, basically, although one that covers a fairly small slice of its subject's life, retelling the last eight years, from 1970 to 1978, in the life of Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), a City Supervisor in San Francisco who was the first openly gay man elected to major public office in the United States. After successfully fighting the vicious Proposition 6 (not unlike the scummy Proposition 8 that so recently passed in California, except that it probably would have had worse long-term repercussions), among other legislative triumphs, Milk was assassinated by a disgruntled, homophobic ex-supervisor named Dan White (Josh Brolin), who had just been rejected for re-appointment to his position after resigning in a fit of pique; White also assassinated San Francisco's mayor, George Moscone (Victor Garber), minutes before turning the gun on Milk.
Milk's life is rich as a subject for cinema, and we certainly could do to have a strong, compelling film treating on his life and achievements. And as it just so happens, we've had one for 24 years: the superlative documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, which runs 38 minutes shorter than Milk while containing more detail about the man's life and the culture of San Francisco in the '70s, the latter topic something that Van Sant's film doesn't really address whatsoever. It's not Milk's fault that it's not as good as a documentary that came out before Ronald Reagan was re-elected president, but no movie exists in a vacuum, and it's impossible for me to argue in all sincerity, that if you're going to see just one movie about Harvey Milk, it should be the one in theaters right now.
At any rate, setting aside those concerns as being overly nitpicky and ungenerous (not to mention that I can spend the rest of my life trumpeting the successes of 24-year-old documentaries, but that doesn't mean anybody is ever going to listen to me), my chief complaint about Milk is that a substantially more interesting movie keeps threatening to pop out and overwhelm the very tasteful study that Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black have worked so hard to construct. (It wouldn't do for me to miss pointing out that the screenplay is very much the weakest element of the film, and everything that works - sometimes smashingly well - only does so by overcoming the script). Particularly in the first half, before Milk's election in 1977, Van Sant and editor Elliot Graham play some wild tricks on the audience, hopscotching from moment to moment (the film is framed by an audio tape Milk recorded shortly before his death, which he always feared would be coming soon, recounting his life and achievements), flipping between newly-filmed footage, stock footage, and newly-filmed footage meant to look like stock footage. There's some heady conceptual work digging into the relationship between reportage and memory going on, and if the whole film had continued in this vein it would hands-down be Van Sant's finest project since My Own Private Idaho. Even in the back half, when notorious right-wing monster Anita Bryant comes into focus, she's presented entirely through stock footage, making one of the most effective and unusual movie villains of the year, and here too it seems like Milk might just turn out to be a masterpiece. But no, it settles down and becomes needlessly typical and hagiographic - like any proper biopic, Milk is the kind of film where all of the protagonist's flaws are forgiven because he feels so incredibly guilty about them, and thus he is essentially blameless. Once again, I must feebly point to the documentary, which is no less loving of the man but far more willing to explore his less savory aspects, such as his shrewd politicking.
My Lord, it does seem like I have a vendetta against the film, which really isn't true. As far as paint-by-numbers biopics go, Milk is unquestionably the best we've seen in years - maybe even the whole decade. Boasting tremendously solid production design that turns San Francisco, 2008 into a dead ringer for San Francisco, 1976, Milk looks absolutely fantastic, and while Harris Savides's cinematography isn't so effective as in his last 1970s period piece set in Frisco, Zodiac, there still aren't many DPs out there right now so willing to use film grain as an important textural element in their photography, rather than trying to airbrush it all from existence.
As for the performances, there's hardly a misstep among them. Penn's uncanny recreation of Milk is getting the most attention, obviously, but it's not just mimicry: along with Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky, Penn gives one of the year's greatest performances as an individual who appears outwardly to be sickeningly cheerful, but whose happiness, while genuine, is part of a much more complex series of emotions that only slowly reveal themselves to us. But he's not even the best member of the cast: that would be Emile Hirsch, an actor I typically can't stand, who plays the young gay activist Cleve Jones, encapsulating all of the snottiness and self-certainty and righteousness of young politicos the world over, and doing it in a way that makes us want to root for him rather than slap him. He outshines a crackerjack cast including two heavily-buzzed Oscar hopefuls who both deserve it: Brolin as the increasingly worn-out Dan White, and James Franco as Scott Smith, Milk's one true love; plus Diego Luna who is tremendously effective as a gigantically annoying neurotic, and Alison Pill as Milk's campaign manager, one of those roles that's always tremendously entertaining in political campaign movies.
Nearly everything, save the writing (which is full of "biopic" lines: h/t Dave Edelstein, scroll down; and light on context and characterisation) is right about Milk; except for some reason, I just can't love it. It is solid craftsmanship throughout. I suspect it's just the case that Van Sant and company wanted so very badly to make an important film about an important that they didn't want to risk adding in anything that might make it challenging.
And before I sign off, I might as well point out the obvious: Milk, as a political document, is a tremendously vital piece of work, and I suppose for John and Jane Middleamerica, the sight of Sean Penn and James Franco with their tongues down each other's throats is probably quite challenging enough, thank you. So insofar as it pushes gay rights with a mighty fervor, I can't help but adore it. But take Brokeback Mountain, which did the same thing (though it was not nearly this gay), and is a tremendous work of art besides. Yes, yes, I know that it's hip to find Brokeback disposable these days. Fuck that. Maybe all I'm really saying is that I like tragic love stories more than I like biopics. At any rate, no matter how very important I think Milk is culturally, praising a film's aesthetic because you agree with its politics isn't criticism. It's Zhdanovism, and I'll have nothing to do with it.
8/10
*"Interesting" and "good" aren't always incompatible, of course. But they are in this particular case.
